I guess you can best explain this by saying its "virtual". Each node has its own IP but the point of a cluster is redundancy. So you give the cluster (node1 and node 2) a virtual name and IP. This is how the cluster is accessed. From the front nobody knows what box they are hitting and it doesn't matter to them. These are cluster resources just as disks are so if node 1 fails node 2 now knows that all requests that go to that cluster name or IP are now his job.

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Exactly. Pretty well you can see each cluster group as like having another server. Each generally has at least one disc resource which shares can be created on, printer spooler, possibly application resources and always needs a network name and ip address to be able to access the resources in it. When the resource group fails over to the other node the resources in the group all go with it so the IP address, network name and discs appear on the other node. As far as client pc's are concerned in theory they don't notice any difference.

Network name & IP address resource is used for virtual server identification. When you install cluster, the applications needs to be available without users know which node is providing access to the application. TO achieve this objective, one needs to use virtual name and valid IP to access the resources running in clusters instead of node name & ip address. In that way, if the node serving the application goes down or taken off, the users need not do any changes to the connectivity part of application as the resource group would automatically failover to another node and users still able to access the resource using virtual IP & name.

Hope it gives enough explanation.

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